Time for a Change

Time for a Change

Davy wondered whether he should change or stay the same. After all he was best known for the rather dramatic way he played hockey. It usually brought him cheers from the home team and the home crowd.

He could not remember a time in his childhood when he did not want to be a professional hockey player. He started organized hockey at five years old. It helped in those early years that he was bigger than all the kids that he played against. Body checking was not allowed at that age, but Davy learned early on to ‘accidently’ run into opponents who had the puck. He often got away with doing that. Sometimes he was penalized, or just made to stay seated by the others and not go on the ice again.

He had other skills that helped him at that time. He could skate relatively fast and was pretty good at handling the puck. These skills helped him score more goals than the other players on the teams that he was on.

The older he got, the more often he ran into the players on the other side. It caused him to be leading in penalties as well as goals for his team and probably the league. But deliberate hard checking was not a truly significant part of his game until he turned 13, when checking was finally allowed. Some times still, though, he would hit a player so hard that his victim had to be carried off of the ice and Davy was taken out of the game. It was around that time when he was given the name of ‘Deadly Davy’. It would stick throughout his career as a hockey player.

It was when he was 16 that he was first scouted. Davy could see that the man was clearly interested in his potential as a professional. What the scout seemed to like best about Davy was his checking. After the end of a game, he walked up to the teenager and told him how much he liked what Davy was doing on the ice, particularly when the opposition would try to avoid him.

He played for two years in junior hockey until he was recruited again. This time it was in the American Hockey League, in which for the first time he would get paid for his playing. His checking and outright running into opponents quickly became noticed in both positive and negative ways.

He was soon drafted by one of the NHL teams that had been badly out-checked the previous season. He quickly gained a reputation as a hard checker and a fighter. Opponents often cleared out of his path when they saw him coming. Fans cheered him on in the home games, yelling out “Davy, Davy, Davy”. He was loudly booed when his team was playing an away game. The fans added “Dirty” before his name, sometimes neglecting to follow that up with “Davy”.

Although he did score goals, as he had a wicked slapshot, he also led the league in penalties. That made him disposable to that first team. Too many goals were scored against them when Davy was in the penalty box, especially with the fighting long term offences for fighting. He was traded at the end of the season to one of the less successful teams.

Thus began a negative pattern in his career. He never lasted with a team more than a year. What bothered him just as much was that in his home town he was no longer asked to speak to kids who played hockey. This happened even though he contributed financially to the local teams. He was only thanked on an e-mail with two or three bland sentences.

.He had heard the coaches speaking of him as a “one trick pony”, who was causing his team to have too many penalties. And some of the local fans even booed him when he got in his third fight in a recent game.

Then he was just dropped by a team, no trade involved. He worried, ‘How can I afford to be without a career. I’ve got to do something.’

Davy decided that he was going to improve his skills other than being a bully. He felt he needed to be a faster and more versatile skater. So he went to a rink in town where local people would skate for pleasure. He did not wear his hockey outfit, and generally tried to look as different as he could from the player that people in town had once cheered but now shunned. As he went around and around the rink, he noticed that there was a young woman, obviously a figure skater, was executing moves that he wanted to be able to do himself. He skated up to her and asked her if she could teach him some of her ‘fancy moves’. He said that he would pay her for the lesson. She looked at him straight in the face and said, “I know who you are, Davy, and I always cheered for you no matter what new team you played for. Soooo, I will not be asking for money for anything that I can teach you. By the way, my name is Daisy.”

He followed her in her skating, imitating every move that she made. It was like they were dancing together. Others on the ice watched them. He felt he had learned more from her in that one session than most of his skating coaches over the years.

He got better and better with every session that he went through when they would arrange to meet on the ice His long legs made it easy to make some smooth moves that he had never made before. Daisy said to him that she thought that he should now be called “Dipsy Doodle Davy”. 3D, you know.

There was a low lying team in the American Hockey League that was desperate for a change. One of the coaches Davy knew and trusted, as they had both had been involved with that team at the same time. He drove down to where he knew they would be practicing their skating, and brought his skates, and other equipment with him. He had a talk with the former coach, who said he would give him a chance. The man was amazed by how the former brute was now a dazzling skater. He signed him up, and the team benefitted for the rest of the year. The next year, the NHL team they were affiliated with saw the videos of the newly remade player and signed him up. And Daisy and Davy signed each other up in a local church.